ABSTRACT
Having considered in the previous chapter a possible Irish source for The Canterbury Tales as a whole, I shall now consider another such source for one of the individual Tales and its Prologue (cf. the definition of 'source' given on p. 34, above). In this chapter I shall discuss Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale in relation to the internationally attested story of the Loathly Lady as preserved in certain Irish accounts, which reflect a version of the story from which the Wife ofBath's Tale, if not her Prologue, has long been thought to derive, and which apparently include the oldest known extant version of the story, as will be indicated below. I shall also discuss the Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale in relation to the three works in Middle English -Gower's Tale ofFlorent and two anonymous poems on the marriage of Sir Gawain-that are regarded as the Tale's closest analogues. Taking the view that the Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale were composed by Chaucer as a single unit, and belonged together from the start, I shall argue that an Irish version of the Loathly Lady story influenced the Wife of Bath's Prologue as well as her Tale, and that the related Middle English works are not so much analogues to her Tale as derivatives of it. I shall further argue that the anonymous thirteenth-century Icelandic prose Laxdada saga, whose heroine, Guorun, hails from a place in Iceland named Laugar, meaning 'baths', also derives, independently of Chaucer, from this same Irish version of the Loathly Lady story, and is thus a hitherto unacknowledged analogue to the Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale. In the second section of the chapter I shall introduce the relevant Irish and Middle English accounts; in the third I shall discuss them in relation to each other; and in the fourth I shall conduct in relation to Laxdcela saga the argument just outlined.
